‘Succession’: why do the miseries of the Roy family drive us crazy?

If we affirm that ‘Succession’ It is one of the best current series, not only do we not exaggerate but, on the contrary, we are probably falling short. Halfway through its third season, the chronicle of the power struggles within the family led by media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is on the way to becoming a legend of television fiction. If you have already achieved the status of other fictions produced by the HBO network such as ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The wire’ It is something that can be discussed, but whoever claims that it is not will need to think hard to find reasons. What follows are some of the arguments that explain its success, endorsed by the news known last Wednesday, October 27: HBO Max has announced its renewal for a fourth season.

Comic drama or tragic comedy?

On June 3, 2018, the HBO network premiered the first season of ‘Succession’, series created by Jesse Armstrong about the vicissitudes of the Roys, a family at the head of a media empire whose despotic patriarch, Logan (Brian Cox), begins to have serious health problems and must look for an heir among his four children, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck). A dazzling comedy display of cruelty with unmistakable Shakespearean pulse in which the monstrous doses of meanness will only be tolerable by the ability of Armstrong and his team of writers to impregnate the whole of a irresistible black humor.

That is, perhaps, the great secret of ‘Succession’: is it a comic drama or a tragic comedy? In any case, and simmering, the series, with its machine guns script lines, its sweltering family storms, his cruel look at the miserable world of the rich, his opening credits with the wonderful tune of Nicholas Britell, his cast of actors in a state of grace, has been captivating audiences and critics to become essential and, of course, in multipremiada: its second season was distinguished last year with seven Emmys, including the best drama series.

A family like ours, or not

A journey in the life of the Roys is a collection of betrayals, lies and stabs in the backso brutal that they are therapeutic for the viewer: they show us that, in comparison, our own family is not so dysfunctional after all. The fierce octogenarian at the center of all this activity knows himself to be more cunning, more ambitious, and more ruthless than any of his opponents will ever be; is a man for whom even love is a form of abuse, and that he has spent his life training his children to smash each other’s faces for his approval.

Over time, inevitably, these four offspring have become a group of broken people, constantly subjected to active and passive humiliation; They may at times hate their father and even their own lives, but they love luxury, and they love living next to the king. They are not going to give that up. Among all of them, without a doubt the most tragic figure embodies her Kendall (Jeremy Strong), a man so damaged that, in his opinion, the only way to win his father’s love is to kill him. You are probably right.

The rich are despicable people

In recent times, various audiovisual fictions have taken it with the rich and their perverse ways of life, such as ‘The White Lotus’ (HBO Max), ‘Exit’ (Filmin) o ‘Nine perfect strangers’ (Prime Video). None, however, like ‘Succession’ to cleverly connect with the ‘zeitgeist’. Jesse Armstrong’s series focuses on the top of the economic and social food chain through the misadventures of a family of media moguls, but without the slightest fascination for the wealth, luxury and status they gave off past milestones on multimillion-dollar lineages like ‘Falcon Crest’, ‘Dynasty’, ‘Dallas’ or, from the rapturous Mexican soap opera, ‘The rich also cry’.

It is not a good time to laugh at the thanks to the most privileged, immodest faces of a world that threatens ruin, and in this sense ‘Succession’ is a magnificent reflection of the despicable actions of that elite that manages the threads of power, as far as tragicomic exaltation of the grotesqueness of his acts. Because to be rich in ‘Succession’ is, above all, to be obnoxious. And yet, and perhaps for that reason, we are fascinated by the series and its universe of evil.

The comfort of the eternal return

In reality, the ‘Succession’ universe is essentially unchanging. It consists of de a cyclical concatenation of crises and battles that always take place in opulent environments, and they always involve fierce adversaries for whom winning or losing is purely a matter of pride because, after all, the filthy rich almost never stop being so. What is at stake between his characters are only emotions, and that is why scandals and financial conflicts are being resolved at a good pace and in a somewhat inconsequential way.

It is mainly in this way that ‘Succession’ keeps us trapped within a ‘status quo, the one that prevails within the Roy family, much more armored than at first we were led to believe. Although with its pilot episode the series was presented as a transcript of ‘King Lear’, or the story of how a group of heirs deal with the death of the patriarch, in reality it has turned out to be the story of how those heirs deal with a patriarch who simply refuses to die. Over and over again we see them maneuver uselessly trying to overthrow him, fail and try again.

To a large extent, HBO has made a name for itself by taking genres considered vulgar as the basis for creating the kinds of fictions that set social media on fire. If ‘The Sopranos’ reinvented gangster intrigue by endowing it with extraordinary psychological depth and ‘Game of Thrones’ altered the conventions of heroic fantasy to talk about politics, basically ‘Succession’, as we mentioned before, is a soap opera about the lives of the rich, similar to ‘Dallas’ or ‘Falcon Crest’; the difference is that here opulence and decadence aspire not to delight us but to turn our stomachs, and to make it clear to us that the pursuit of wealth is often a way to fill huge inner voids.

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Equally successful has been the chain’s strategy when it comes to cultivating the audience for the series. Although he won a staunch legion of defenders, his first season cannot be said to have been a success. It was the long parenthesis that preceded the premiere of the second that allowed word of mouth to work its magic, and made The Roys’ misadventures will cease to be television’s best kept secret to become meme and GIF meat. In the case of the transit between the second and third, the restrictions derived from the covid-19 lengthened the wait until it was almost unbearable for the growing legion of fans.